Article 60 of Liberland vs The World
Liberland vs. St. Kitts and Nevis: Caribbean Citizenship Pioneers vs. Danube Stateless Dream
The Free Republic of Liberland, founded in 2015 on 7 km² of Danube terra nullius, runs on voluntary taxation, blockchain governance, and the Liberland Dollar (LLD) token. With more than 800,000 citizenship applications, it remains the purest ongoing attempt to create a society without coercion.
St. Kitts and Nevis, the smallest sovereign state in the Western Hemisphere by both area (261 km²) and population (48,000 in 2025), invented the modern citizenship-by-investment industry in 1984 and has since sold more than 50,000 passports. In 2024–2025 it launched the world’s first fully blockchain-tracked CBI programme on Polygon, introduced a state-backed stablecoin (the Eastern Caribbean CBDC is already live, but SKN is piloting its own “KITT” token), and became the first nation to accept cryptocurrency directly for citizenship purchases. GDP per capita exceeds $25,000, making it one of the wealthiest micro-states on Earth.
This article compares the two across Historical Origins, Culture & Society, Environment, Governance & Economy, and Diplomacy—the original citizenship-by-investment nation versus the newest citizenship-by-contribution experiment.
Historical Origins
• Liberland: Declared 13 April 2015 on a territorial dispute between Croatia and Serbia.
• St. Kitts and Nevis: Arawak and Carib habitation; Columbus sighted 1493; British colony 1623; independence 19 September 1983 as the youngest sovereign state in the Americas; sugar collapsed in 2005, replaced overnight by CBI revenue.
Comparison: Both turned extreme constraint into opportunity—St. Kitts by monetising sovereignty itself after sugar died, Liberland by claiming a pocket no one else wanted.
Culture & Society
• Liberland: Digital-first, voluntaryist diaspora.
• St. Kitts and Nevis: Creole culture, Carnival, and calypso; 2025 census shows 22% of legal residents are CBI citizens living abroad; every passport now contains an optional blockchain soulbound token for verified identity; youth lead Caribbean crypto adoption.
Comparison: St. Kitts already has a population where one in five “citizens” are effectively e-residents who rarely visit—closer to Liberland’s model than any other UN member.
Environment
• Liberland: 7 km² Danube River floodplain. Could be environmentally protected by my proposed Community Land Trust.
• St. Kitts and Nevis: Volcanic islands; 2025–2030 National Adaptation Strategy includes mangrove-backed carbon credits and a “Blue Citizenship” add-on that lets CBI investors offset purchases with verified reef restoration tokens.
Comparison: Both are turning natural capital into tradeable digital assets to fund sovereignty.
Governance & Economy
• Liberland: Zero compulsory taxes; future DAO operations for most “government services” my proposed LTAA would ensure complete on-chain transparency.
• St. Kitts and Nevis: Parliamentary federation; no personal income tax, no capital-gains tax, no inheritance tax; CBI price $250,000+ (payable in BTC/ETH/USDC since 2024); 2025 Blockchain Economic Citizenship Act tracks every application on Polygon for full transparency; state treasury accepts BTC and other major tokens for certain fees, maybe LLD could be adopted via blockchain diplomacy?
Comparison: St. Kitts already operates the world’s most successful voluntary citizenship market and has moved the entire process on-chain—functionally the closest any recognised state has come to Liberland’s philosophical endpoint while still collecting revenue.
Diplomacy
• Liberland: Zero UN recognitions, but has MOU’s with both state and non-state entities.
• St. Kitts and Nevis: Full UN member; 168 diplomatic relations; passport ranks 24th globally (92 visa-free including Schengen, UK, Singapore); OECD white-listed despite CBI; first Caribbean nation to sign blockchain cooperation MOU with Dubai and Singapore.
Comparison: St. Kitts proves that selling citizenship at scale does not prevent strong passport power or global acceptance.
Conclusion
St. Kitts and Nevis—48,000 people on two volcanic rocks that invented citizenship-by-investment forty years ago and just put the entire programme on blockchain—has built the most successful real-world version of what Liberland is ideologically attempting: a sovereign entity whose primary export is citizenship itself, funded voluntarily, and now recorded immutably.
Liberland offers citizenship by contribution for free (or for LLM); St. Kitts charges a quarter-million dollars and accepts crypto. One is still seeking recognition; the other has been perfecting the model since 1984 and now runs it on the same rails Liberland dreams of.
Between the Caribbean hillside where passports are minted and the Danube pocket where they are given away lies the full spectrum of modern sovereignty: from pure philosophy to pure profit, both converging on the same realisation—that in the 21st century, a nation’s most valuable territory may not be its land, but its legal identity. One sells it. The other gifts it. Both understand the future better than most countries a thousand times their size.